Local oral tradition says that the rebellion was led by Maria Olofa (Wolofa) and Gonzalo Mandinga, a romantic couple, both Muslims from the Wolof nation.
In 1496, when Columbus was in the Cape Verde archipelago, in a letter addressed to the Catholic Monarchs, in a fragment he notes: “Slaves were sold for eight thousand maravedis per head” 4.
Dominican historian Celsa Albert Batista, quoting Carlos Larrazábal Blanco, states: “In 1496, when the city of Santo Domingo was founded, there was a black presence on the island” 5 .
Precisely, in the year 1502, the Catholic Monarchs sent Nicolás de Ovando as governor of the island of Santo Domingo, a man characterized by being efficient and far-sighted; also implacable and insensitive.
While he had the government in his hands, Ovando was the one who carried out the most policy changes; He requested that the crown suspend the importation of African slaves, believing that not only did they take advantage of every opportunity to flee, but they also encouraged the Indians to rebel.
The Spanish monarch had recently given him “carte blanche” to import all the natives he wanted from the surrounding islands; he could kidnap them, as in the case of the Lucayans of the Bahamas, as had been done on other occasions, place them where they were needed and distribute them according to the custom that had been followed until then.
Referring to the massive black presence, Spanish author Carlos Esteban Deive explains: “The African black arrived in Santo Domingo as a slave, and it was he who completed, with his forced labor, the activity of the Spanish conqueror… He arrived with a broken culture; forcibly torn from his land, transported and transplanted to a new habitat that was not his own, forced to integrate into an unknown society; he found himself in a position of economic and social subordination.
For his part, Colombian anthropologist Aquiles Escalante Polo points out that: “The punishments given to the runaway fugitives ranged from lashes, the stocks, the cutting off of their genitals, limbs and death itself… to the escaped black, after twenty days of having fled.
Cyriaque Simon Pierre, quoting Martinican historian Edouard Glissant, says: “The enslaved person was undoubtedly a mobile tool in a slave production system” 15 .
In addition, the most commonly known arguments of that time consisted of depicting the black person in an angle of barbarism and savagery, first in Europe and then in the American colonies.
Francisco Jimenes de Cisneros, who was King Regent of the Spanish Crown between 1516 and 1517, quoted by Carlos Federico Guillot, stated: “Blacks are suitable for war, men without honor and without faith and thus capable of betrayals and unrest, which by multiplying will infallibly rise up, wanting to impose on the Spaniards the same chains that they carry” 17 .
With the accession to the Spanish throne of Charles V, surprisingly, the Jerónimo friars, who had been appointed governor of the island of Hispaniola by the now deceased Cisneros, also made requests to bring in African slaves.
One of them was Friar Bernardino de Manzanedo, who wrote a letter to the Spanish monarch, and in a fragment of it he literally states:18 That all the citizens of Hispaniola asked His Majesty to grant them a license to import blacks, because the Indians were not enough for the colonists to support themselves... they should send as many women as men and, since the blacks raised in Castile could turn out to be rebellious, that these new slaves should be bozales (brought directly from Africa), from the best territories of Africa or from any part south of Senegal.In January 1518, Judge Alonso Zuazo, “very concerned” about the decline in the Indian population, wrote to the Emperor Charles suggesting ways to increase the labor force in the New World, “where the land was the best on the planet, where it was neither too cold nor too hot, where there was nothing to complain about, where everything was green and everything grew, as when Christ, in the great Augustinian peace, redeemed the Old World; he added, obsequiously, that there was something similar in the arrival of Charles, for he would redeem the New World…he recommended that he grant a general license for the importation of blacks suitable for work on the islands, unlike the natives, “so weak that they were only good for light work…it would be foolish to suppose that, if they were brought there, the blacks would rebel…the canes were as thick as a man’s wrist and it would be wonderful to build large sugar mills” 19 .
As for the facts, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas firmly supported these requests, to bring African slaves to be replaced in the work done by the Indians.
Las Casas, a recognized and established defender of the Indians to protect them from mistreatment, protested for many years that he was blinded to the need to prevent Africans from suffering these same treatments.